Currying

Currying is an advanced technique of working with functions. It’s used not only in JavaScript, but in other languages as well. Currying is a transformation of functions that translates a function from callable as f(a, b, c) into callable as f(a)(b)©. Currying doesn’t call a function. It just transforms it. Let’s see an example first, to better understand what we’re talking about, and then practical applications. We’ll create a helper function curry(f) that performs currying for a two-argument f. In other words, curry(f) for two-argument f(a, b) translates it into a function that runs as f(a)(b): As you can see, the implementation is straightforward: it’s just two wrappers. - The result of curry(func) is a wrapper function(a). - When it is called like curriedSum(1), the argument is saved in the Lexical Environment, and a new wrapper is returned function(b). - Then this wrapper is called with 2 as an argument, and it passes the call to the original sum. More advanced implementations of currying, such as _.curry from lodash library, return a wrapper that allows a function to be called both normally and partially:

Currying? What for?

To understand the benefits we need a worthy real-life example. For instance, we have the logging function log(date, importance, message) that formats and outputs the information. In real projects such functions have many useful features like sending logs over the network, here we’ll just use alert: Let’s curry it! After that log works normally: …But also works in the curried form: Now we can easily make a convenience function for current logs: Now logNow is log with fixed first argument, in other words “partially applied function” or “partial” for short. We can go further and make a convenience function for current debug logs: So: 1. We didn’t lose anything after currying: log is still callable normally. 2. We can easily generate partial functions such as for today’s logs.

Advanced curry implementation

In case you’d like to get in to the details, here’s the “advanced” curry implementation for multi-argument functions that we could use above. It’s pretty short: Usage examples: The new curry may look complicated, but it’s actually easy to understand. The result of curry(func) call is the wrapper curried that looks like this: When we run it, there are two if execution branches: 1. If passed args count is the same or more than the original function has in its definition (func.length) , then just pass the call to it using func.apply. 2. Otherwise, get a partial: we don’t call func just yet. Instead, another wrapper is returned, that will re-apply curried providing previous arguments together with the new ones. Then, if we call it, again, we’ll get either a new partial (if not enough arguments) or, finally, the result.

Summary

Currying is a transform that makes f(a,b,c) callable as f(a)(b)©. JavaScript implementations usually both keep the function callable normally and return the partial if the arguments count is not enough. Currying allows us to easily get partials. As we’ve seen in the logging example, after currying the three argument universal function log(date, importance, message) gives us partials when called with one argument (like log(date)) or two arguments (like log(date, importance)).

*!*
function curry(f) { // curry(f) does the currying transform
  return function(a) {
    return function(b) {
      return f(a, b);
    };
  };
}
*/!*

// usage
function sum(a, b) {
  return a + b;
}

let curriedSum = curry(sum);

alert( curriedSum(1)(2) ); // 3